Life After
by Svendances
Summary: My take on what life would be like for Evie if they ever managed to end the games completely. Evie/Aric fic.


_After finishing Dead of Winter I started to contemplate what Evie's life might be like in the future if they ever managed to end the games. So this is my take on it. I may add to it at a later date if this gets an okay response._

**Life After**

"How are you feeling?" Aric asked, eyeing me appraisingly. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"

I finished braiding my hair back, pasted on a smile and lied through my teeth. "Definitely." And even though we'd been over it a million time already, I said patiently, "She's fifteen. Her training is going well. She's excelling in her studies. She's not going to stay here forever. She's ready."

"But are _you_ ready?" he repeated, laying gentle, bare hands on my shoulders. "She doesn't have to go yet. We could wait another year or two."

I shook my head, holding his gaze in the mirror. "We already promised her she could go."

"You do so hate broken promises," Aric mentioned, gliding his fingers up my throat.

Fifteen years, almost to the day, had passed since we'd finally managed to end the Games. For good. In the end it had all been remarkably unremarkable. There was no blinding Flash like in the beginning of the final Game. No triumphant fanfare. No appearance from the Gods who had sent us to this fate in the first place. One minute there was pain, and screaming. The next it was all over. The moment our daughter was born, the Games ended. Just as Gran had predicted.

Not that we'd noticed at first.

As you could imagine, the excitement – pain, exertion and exhaustion – of giving birth, and beholding the product of our love for the first time took all of our attention for several hours. It wasn't until Aric had laid the child in the bassinet near our bed, being careful to maintain a constant cloth barrier between his skin and hers, and returned to my side for a well-earned rest that we'd gotten our first clue.

He sat on the side of the bed, one hand on my sheet-covered thigh, the other reaching up to caress my face. He froze, hand in mid-air, his eyes widening. Before I could ask what was wrong, he was examining both his hands. And when that didn't yield the answers he sought, he lifted both of mine, running his elegant fingers over the backs of each. Several tense minutes later, he raised his still eide gaze to mine.

"What?" I asked, my heart pounding. He was freaking me out. "What is it?"

"Our icons," he murmured, seemingly in a daze. "They're gone."

"What?" I wrenched my gaze from his to glance down at our entwined icon hands, and sure enough, they were blank. Not a single mark on them. "We did it," I whispered, my breath rushing from my lungs in relief as fresh tears sprang to my eyes. I flung my arms around his neck.

"Your grandmother was right," Aric confirmed, wrapping his arms around my waits and pulling me tighter to him.

Recalling the day like it as yesterday, I spun around to face my husband with a new wave of love burbling up. Every day, I thanked the Gods for ending the Games so I could have this time with Aric.

Just as I rose up on tip toes to press my lips to the corner of his mouth we were interrupted, as I knew we inevitably would be, by a chorus of yells erupting from the kitchen downstairs.

"Mom!"

Sighing, I let my forehead drop to his chest and prayed to those same Gods I had been thanking just moments ago, for strength. It was like they had a sixth sense for when their father and I were having a moment.

"Ignore them," Aric murmured by my ear, wrapping the end of my braid around his fingers. "They can figure it out for themselves."

But we both knew that wasn't going to happen, because right on cue, the cry came again.

"MOM!"

Aric was hot on my heels as I slipped from our bedroom and made my way down the stairs, following the sound of our children's voices arguing. "If she's not mature enough to keep the peace with her siblings for five minutes," he muttered under his breath. "She's not mature enough to leave the grounds."

"We already promised her she could go," I reminded him as we reached the last stair and started down the hall. "You're not going back on your word. This will be a good chance for the two of your to bond."

Aric scoffed. "We bond for two hours every day during her training," he pointed out.

"Two hours which she is loath to attend most days," I countered. "You need to let her in more. You need to let them _all_ in more."

"And you think taking the girl on a two week round riding trip is going to help with -."

His words were cut off as we reached the kitchen doorway and took in the pandemonium before us. Aurora, the eldest, had a frypan raised above her head, eyes darting all over the tiled floor like she'd lost something. Her brother Raven was on his hands and knees, crawling amongst a mess of baked beans and chair legs, his cotton pyjama pants soaking up the watery sauce with every movement. Up on the counter, her small hands gripping an open cupboard door to keep her balance, stood six year old Keeya. This was _not_ a typical breakfast scene.

"What is going on here?" Aric demanded, his booming voice causing the scene to freeze before our very eyes. Three fair haired heads slowly turned to face us. I could sense Aric moving his carefully calculating gaze from one child to the next.

"Daddy!" Keeya exclaimed, her little feet stamping. "Rav brought a rat inside!"

I just barely contained my eye roll as Aric crossed the floor to his little girl. He would never admit it, but she was his favourite. Of the three, she was the only one to inherit my blue eyes, and that was all it took for him to allow himself to be wrapped around her little finger.

With Aurora he had always been careful, taking great pains to ensure their skin never touched, and as she grew so did his protective instincts. Raven, as the only boy, received stern orders to watch out for his sisters – both of them, despite being five years Aurora's junior – and was regularly engaged in 'man talks' that neither Aurora, nor I were privy to. But when his attention turned to Keeya, it was like everything softened. I'd found the pair on more than one occasion entertaining her dolls in a post-training tea party.

Not that he would ever admit to that, either. The one time I'd mentioned it in the privacy of our bedroom, he'd insisted that they were merely refuelling after the morning's exertion, ensuring his daughter had the strength to get through the rest of the day.

Of course Aurora, with all her training, also noticed the difference in the way her father treated herself and her younger brother and sister, and as such had built up a healthy disdain toward the man. Any closeness they may have achieved during her childhood had quickly dwindled once she hit puberty.

"What are you doing up there?" Aric asked the Keeya now, raising his arms to retrieve her from the counter. In the next second though, he'd snatched his hands away and was hurrying from the room. He didn't even meet my eyes as he brushed past my shoulder in the doorway.

"What was that about?" Raven asked from the floor, glancing from his younger sister, to me, to the hall where his father had disappeared.

Ever observant, Aurora set the frypan down on the stove with a clang and moved to retrieve a dish cloth from the sink, tossing it down to her brother. "Dad forgot his gloves," she informed him, grabbing a second cloth and wiping down the mess on the table. "Can't possibly touch his filthy kids without them." She rinsed the cloth, returning to the table with a muttered, "Germ phobe."

Shaking my head, I lowered Keeya to the sticky floor with instructions to stay put, all the while wondering how my eldest child could possibly endure two whole weeks with her father without flying off the handle at him. Maybe Aric was right. Maybe she wasn't mature enough to venture beyond the walls yet.

"Your father does not think you're filthy," I informed them, despite the mess Raven had made of his pyjamas and the sauce that was splattered across Keeya's upper half.

"I don't think he's ever touched me with his bare skins," Raven mused, like he hadn't heard me. Probably, he hadn't.

Aurora scoffed, sounding just like her father as she rinsed her cloth once more. "I can't blame him," she said, _'accidentally' _hitting her brother with the wet rag on her way back to the table. "I wouldn't touch you with a ten foot pole." Looking up from her tasked she sought my gaze across the kitchen. "I don't understand why touching your skin is okay, but ours is so repulsive to him. What's wrong with us?"

I'd just opened my mouth to reassure them that it was nothing personal, as I had so many millions of times throughout the course of their lives, when Keeya, crouched on the floor where she'd been picking up individual beans to eat, piped up, "He doesn't want to turn us into vampires."

I blinked in confusion, but once again, my children beat me to vocalising their thoughts.

"What?" Rave asked, pulling a face that skewed his features into something almost unrecognisable. "How does that even work?"

Keeya made an exasperated sound, like it should have been obvious. "Daddy doesn't want to turn us into vampires like him," she explained slowly, popping another bean into her mouth and licking sauce off her fingers. "So she doesn't touch us with his skin."

"That's not how vampires turn people, idiot," Raven retorted, tossing his bean filled rag into the sink.

"Don't call your sister an idiot," I reprimanded automatically, emptying the beans from the cloth and handing it back so he could finish up cleaning the sauce that his pants hadn't managed to soak up. "And your father is not a vampire. How many times do I have to tell you he has a… skin condition?" Even after all these years, I still couldn't help hesitating over the lie. It was for their own good, I reminded myself. Aric included. He just couldn't bear the looks they were sure to give him if they ever learned the truth.

"Yeah," Aurora said, her voice muffled as she rummaged through the cupboards for a supplementary breakfast now that the beans had been wasted. "It would cause him unimaginable pain if we were to come into contact with his skin," she repeated my oft recited words. "Even a gentle brush would be excruciating."

The words were not untrue, I'd simply failed to mention that the pain would be _emotional_ rather than _physical_. And that they would most likely be dead, if their father was right.

I'd tried to convince him, in those first few months after Aurora was born and the Games had ended, that it would be all right. Our daughter was a combination of both our genes and would therefore also be immune to his deathly touch. But he'd refused to risk it. Even as it became apparent that my own powers had vanished along with our icons, he would not allow his bare skin to touch hers.

I can't say I blamed him.

He'd lived for centuries – more than two thousand years – cursed with the touch of death. Unable to make physical contact with any living being without killing them. He'd accidentally brought about his parents' demise – an event that still played on his conscience daily – when he was just coming into his powers. Aric would rather die himself than allow his skin to touch our children's.

After a particularly close call when Aurora was three months old and still discovering what her limbs could do and almost made her little fist connect with Aric's cheek during a rare cuddle, he'd vowed to keep his distance. Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise.

It was hard. For him. For them. For me. He was unable to shower them with the love and affection he longed to give, and as such came off as a cold hearted authority figure who spent weeks at a time away from our secluded compound. Aurora, Raven and even young Keeya had learned early on to come to me for everything rather than bother their father.

We'd agreed to tell them the truth eventually, when they were old enough to understand. We vowed to tell the full story of how the world beyond our walls came to be the way it as now. To tel them of the fine men and women who lost their lives in the name of Godly entertainment. To reveal the special powers we no longer possessed. But the time had not presented itself yet, and so the children remained perplexed by their father's aloofness.

Which brought us back to Aurora's trip.

She'd been pestering us – mostly me – since she was old enough to climb the drain pipe to the roof of the stables to let her venture outside the gates. She wanted to explore the world out there. To meet new people.

Aric, of course, was strongly against the idea. More than fifteen years may have passed since the Flash wiped out most of civilisation as we knew it and created horrible creatures and impossible obstacles for the survivors, but the world was still a dangerous place. There were still reports of bagmen creeping out from under their rocks at night to quench their thirst from every settlement Aric visited. There weren't as many as there once was, but we still hadn't been able to eradicate them completely. And then there were the looters and other unsavoury characters that roamed about under the cover of darkness – or sometimes even in broad daylight – pillaging and plundering. The rebuilding of civilisation was a slow progress indeed.

Eventually, not long before Aurora's birthday, he finally agreed to allow her to accompany him on a routine trip to a couple of nearby settlements to trade produce and supplies. We didn't want for much, safely ensconced within the walls of the compound Aric had created, in fact we often had more than we needed and so we traded our excess with the settlements for items that are not so easy to come by in this day and age.

The moment Aric conceded defeat in the matter of keeping his daughter contained forever, I'd taken her aside after her training and studies were done for the day and told her the news. She was, at once, overjoyed and nervous. Her whole life she'd been trained in martial arts and weaponry, but had never been in a situation where she'd had to use either skill. She had a great deal of knowledge regarding edible and poisonous plants, but again, had never really had to think about it, since our crops were clearly labelled. She was worried that she would make a mistake on the road and wind up ill, injured or dead, and simply be told to suck it up. Because that was the kind of man she thought her father was.

I'd taken it upon myself, then, to teach her all I could in preparation for her trip. All the tips and tricks I'd learned from Jack and Aric, or figured out on my own. I'd helped her pack her bag, watched her repack it herself. Reminded her again and again to never be without it. I don't know how many times I'd told her that her pack should be stuck to her like glue. Hopefully it had all sunk in, though, because after today, there was no turning back. They were set to ride out directly after breakfast.

Aric re-entered the kitchen, gloves firmly in place, just as Aurora was placing a plate full of toast and the various spreads we had on the table. He said nothing as he took his seat beside Keeya and started buttering her toast. I grabbed a jug of freshly squeezed juice from the refrigerator and sat down on his other side.

"Are you all set for your big trip?" I asked Aurora, glancing to her as I took my first bite.

"Definitely," she assured me, presenting with the same fake smile I'd given Aric upstairs. I noticed the bags under her eyes from lack of sleep and the way the corners of her mouth turned down as she contemplated the crunchy bread in her hand. "Ready to go," she added, absently brushing a wisp of hair out of her eyes. She'd braided her long locks in to a crown around her head, intricately weaving lengths of green ribbon through it. It reminded me so much of my crown of vines that I had to swallow back a sudden jab of longing.

Some days I missed my powers.

"You'll be fine," I assured her. "Your father's made this trip more times than he can count. Haven't you, dear."

"I know the route like the back of my hand," Aric confirmed with a small nod.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Aurora's eye roll as she muttered quietly, "Well that would be more reassuring if he didn't wear gloves all the time."


End file.
